Race & Identity

What does a Mexican-hating right-wing radio shock jock named Jay Severin have in common with President Obama's yet-to-be-named Supreme Court nominee? The former already is, and the latter will likely turn out to be, a signifier of a new political calculus that is lowering the profile of the burgeoning Latino electorate, two-thirds of which is Mexican American.

I wonder what the late historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. would have made of Texas Gov. Rick Perry's pandering to Lone Star secessionists on April 15. I'd love to hear what he'd say about Sarah Palin's flirtation with the Alaskan Independence Party and its disdain for the rest of the United States.

Way back in 1991, Schlesinger wrote a bestselling book, "The Disuniting of America," in which he argued that multiculturalism was threatening the integrity of the nation. "The cult of ethnicity," he wrote, culminated in an "attack" on a commonly shared American identity.

Writing From New Orleans -- Four years after New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin tried to endear himself to black voters by playing to their fears that they were about to be "overrun by Mexican workers," things have and haven't changed.

Mexican and other Latin American migrants who came to rebuild in the wake of Hurricane Katrina didn't overwhelm the city. But, at roughly 15% of the population -- up from 3% pre-Katrina -- they aren't going away either, and New Orleans is grappling with their presence as part of a larger post-disaster demographic shift.

How much is your ethnicity worth? In hard cash. Dollars and cents. How much do you think you can get for it?

When we talk about race in America, we speak in terms of power and strife. When we bring up ethnicity, we focus on the gushy stuff -- pride and the sense of belonging that strong cultural identities create. Think of those quaint, exotics-on-display "isn't diversity great?" stories on National Public Radio.

For the record, "Yes we can" emerged as a slogan later and less deliberately than one might think. The year was 1972, three years after César Chávez had appeared on the cover of Time magazine and two years after he had led farmworkers to a major victory against grape producers in California. Chávez was in Arizona trying to reverse a law prohibiting strikes by farmworkers during harvest time. Supporters of Chávez told him the law couldn’t be repealed. "No se puede," they said. Dolores Huerta, a colleague of Chávez’s, disagreed. "Sí! Sí se puede," she insisted.

Last year, I had the great pleasure of seeing The Order of Myths, Margaret Brown's brilliant documentary film on Mobile, Alabama's storied, and segregated, Mardi Gras celebrations. Even now, long after the end of Jim Crow, the city's leading white families put together an elaborate series of Mardi Gras balls and parades under the auspices of the Mobile Carnival Association, and they name a royal court to preside over the festivities. Starting in 1938, a number of black families formed the Mobile Area Mardi Gras Association (MAMGA) to do exactly the same.

Almost 13 years ago, the photographer Mariana Cook met with a young Chicago couple, Barack and Michelle Obama, as part of a larger project on the changing nature of marriage and love in America. Recently, The New Yorker published Cook's extraordinary 1996 interview. Then as now, Michelle Obama was strikingly outspoken. Among other things, she described her ambivalence about her husband's political ambitions, which were just then taking shape.

A recent column in the alumni newsletter of my alma mater, the University of Mississippi, is headlined "We Have Legacies." The quote is lifted from the column and would ordinarily evoke the world of Southern landed gentry. A photograph on the page, however, shows the author to be an African-American woman, thereby turning another Old South stereotype on its head at a school that already has cast off many symbols of its all-white history.

Hillary Rodham Clinton is right. She has the broader and whiter political coalition, so she should, by all rights, be the Democratic presidential nominee.

After all, in other realms of the political process, we routinely refer to "black districts" or "Latino districts" and speak of the necessity of those jurisdictions to be represented by black or Latino elected officials. Well, then, because the American population is 66% white, maybe the United States is a de facto white district that should be represented accordingly.